Birthday Issues
by ercarterfan
Summary: Written for a fanfiction challege about birthdays.. Carter reflects on his time at county. Short Story!


Birthday Issues

_A/N: I wrote this one awhile ago, I'm finding unfinished fictions on my computer and figure that since they are sitting there I might as well get them out in the open. This is a short story, single chapter not going to continue it._

There is a thing about birthdays; you look forward to each one as you grow up because it marks another important mile stone in your life. Your first birthday is a major one, everyone celebrates, and hey you've been in the world a whole year marking the transition from baby to toddler. Your fifth birthday you are now old enough to go to school. You wait with great anticipation for birthday number 13, because now you are one of those teenagers everyone talks about. Wow before you know it your 16 and driving your first car. 17 and you get to attend your first unsupervised rated R movie, you blink and you are 18 leaving home an adult now rather than a child. After that you look forward to turning 21, your really an adult now and can drink with all the older people. After that well there's nothing between 21 and 40 really.

Everything that happened for me between 22 and now really wasn't actually age related so why did I not look forward to celebrating my 34th birthday. Well there were a lot of reasons. It had all started last year with losing my grandmother, gamma meant the world to me and with out her I was completely and utterly lost in life.

After my first year at County I decided that over the summer I would go to St. Bart's that was a good birthday, sun, sand and no Benton for the entire summer. Granted when I came back from that Summer I was late and heard about it from Benton, especially since I didn't get any reading done but there was something special about the trip.

My second "birthday" that I celebrated was not nearly as memorable, I mean I remember some of it, but it was the first one that I celebrated as a doctor. I might have missed my graduation and all that good jazz, but you know what it didn't really matter because I was finally what I had always wanted to be.

The third birthday was rather uneventful nothing there to remember it came and went just as any other day of the year would. That was the year that a new intern started at County and well the start of what I hoped would be a very interesting romance.

Birthday number four at County was spent nursing a broken heart, as that romance that I was hoping for was fizzled out, I had a falling out with my family and the year that I was so looking forward too, turned out to be everything short of that, and I ended up with a broken heart that year for my birthday.

The fifth year at County ended up giving me fits, that one is one that I would like to forget. I had the energizer bunny as a med student of mine. I had to take a job as a resident advisor on top of my ER shifts which did nothing but leave me tired all the time. Oh it was not a good year, things were not looking up for me there any either.

I pushed away my girlfriend, which was probably the start of everything going downhill for me. I had met her the first time several years ago, well over 5 years ago to be a little more specific. But I hadn't thought of her at that time as anything more than a medical student and it was my job to teach her. Now this leads me into birthday number six at county, and well year number six at county that takes the cake above them all. For you see this was the year that I was stabbed, my energizer bunny med student was stabbed and killed and I ended up addicted to pain killers. It was the woman who two years later would eventually become my girlfriend saved my life. She turned me in for drug use which saved my life but it took me another two years after that to actually get to where I could ask her out. I spent that birthday in Rehab, best thing that anyone ever made me do.

That birthday year number seven, I was just happy to have something that resembled a job left when I got back from Atlanta that was about the only thing I remember about that birthday. Amazing how we can block out that which we care not to remember.

And after one bad year of dating where it seemed that we had our good moments that were always outweighed somehow with all the bad things that happened. Eric, Maggie, then Gamma dying, it just added up the baggage seemed to be more than enough to sink the little ship we were both desperately clinging too. I felt and overwhelming desire to get out of Chicago and I took the first opportunity that came along, Africa.

What I thought was going to help me find myself, my lost battered soul indeed did nothing more than lose it even more. It made me blind to the most important thing in my life. While I felt needed in Africa, I neglected to see the fact that when I returned the first time I had been needed in Chicago.

I missed what I should have seen when she asked for her key back. I took that as a slap in the face, but it was more than that. I had abandoned her. This time it wasn't something that she had done, it was in all honesty something that I had done and there it was plain as day and I couldn't bring myself to see it. I chose willingly to focus on my pain, my anger, my frustrations, rather than to admit that I had cause her pain, her anger and her frustrations. It was a mistake and I know that now, I just wish that it hadn't taken me all this time to figure that out. The pain that I have caused her now is unforgivable and I know that if I can not forgive myself for it how can I expect her to forgive me for it.

So I am back where I started again. I find myself all alone as I open my eyes to just another day, the only difference between today, yesterday an tomorrow is that today marked on more year that I have been here I am no longer 33 but rather 34. I can not say that I feel any older than I did yesterday, but I think the events that had occurred over the year had aged me more than just a single year.


End file.
